Ruled by Steel (The Ascension Series #3) Read online

  The slave tried to free her wrist, but the motion only made the hook dig in deeper. He flicked his wrist and wrapped the chain around her forearm.

  Again, he said, “To the wall.” He punctuated this by kicking her in the back. The woman stumbled and caught herself on the playroom wall.

  She wasn’t nearly as fast without the ability to phase. The woman turned, but he seized the back of her neck and smashed her face into the black bricks between the chains, slamming twice. A crack suggested that her nose might have broken.

  A shame to damage such a pristine face.

  He did it again.

  Belphegor didn’t react to her foot slamming down on his instep, nor did the elbow in his solar plexus have any effect. He bound both of her arms together with the chain, hook firmly entrenched in her wrist, and attached them to a pulley. With two pulls on the rope, the slave’s arms were jerked over her head, stretching her naked body tall and long. A third pull lifted her to the tips of her toes.

  She grunted, jaw clenched.

  “I have other spells built into the mortar of my office,” Belphegor said, as emotionlessly as ever. “It is sound-proofed, and, yes, energy-proofed. If our interaction hurts you, please feel free to leak all of your infernal powers in panic. It will harm nobody within the House.”

  “Thanks for the information,” she said. She still was not afraid, bound to his wall and warded into corporeality.

  Belphegor removed a drawer from his cabinet and set it on the edge of the desk. He had a delightful mix of tools within the drawer: studded phalluses and corkscrews and jagged-toothed pliers. There were many things that might be able to put the fear into her.

  He selected a leather gag with a spiked mouthpiece and turned to face her again.

  While Belphegor had been distracted, she had used the strength of her arms and her feet against the wall to lift her body, bringing her bent arms level with her face. She chewed at the bandages on her hand with her canines. Cloth ripped, and the bandaging fell free.

  Light flared on her hand where the flesh had been concealed. Colorful runes slid over her knuckles, between her fingers, and down the inside of her wrist. Now that they had been freed, they marched down her arms like insects.

  It was magic, but magic that he had never seen before.

  And no demon had cast magic since the era before the Treaty of Dis.

  Belphegor was becoming mildly concerned.

  He seized the first thing in the drawer that he touched—the studded phallus. It was crafted from dense stone, capable of heating to a searing temperature, with metal protruding from the mushroomed head. It would make an excellent bludgeon.

  She pointed her fingers at him. At the same moment he lunged at her, raising the phallus over his head.

  The slave spoke.

  It was not English or the infernal tongue that fell from her lips, but a silent word that quaked the room, making the floor tremble under his feet and his desk shudder. One of the runes ignited and vanished. He felt it punch him in the chest.

  Belphegor’s back slammed into the opposite wall. The contact was severe enough to make his vision momentarily black out.

  When he could see again, the woman had freed herself and stood over him with the chain still wrapped around one arm.

  “I think I told you to get against the wall,” she said.

  Belphegor didn’t bother responding. He instead began to swell, allowing his limbs to stretch and his chest to widen. He could grow to the size of the Palace’s once-glorious tower, given enough space; he believed he would only need to be perhaps twenty feet tall to crush this woman.

  She jumped behind him and wrapped her arm around his throat before he could grow more than a foot. Her rune-encrusted hand spasmed wildly over his chest. With another word of power and a second ignited rune, he felt his muscles harden.

  He could neither grow nor run—nor make any other motion.

  Belphegor’s concern increased fractionally.

  She pulled the silver chain tight around his body. Her strength was easily equal to his when his muscles were ossified by magic, and she trussed him with the chain within moments. She dragged him across the floor, hooked him to the pulley, and lifted him off of the ground so that his stiff legs dangled uselessly beneath him.

  He could only watch as she flicked a couple more runes at him, placing a wall of fire on the floor between them and reinforcing the chains. When she finished, she stepped back to study him. The woman seemed satisfied with the result.

  She wiped the amber blood off of her upper lip and picked up the phallus. She registered no emotion at its appearance, though her grip was white-knuckled.

  The slave rounded on him and swung.

  Pain exploded across Belphegor’s face, making his vision erupt in stars. The second strike split the skin on his cheekbone. Cold blood coursed down the side of his face, chilling his immobile flesh.

  “You’re fucking sick,” she said, tossing the bloody phallus in the drawer. “How many humans have you raped?”

  “One every month for centuries,” Belphegor said. His lips barely moved.

  She grunted. “Guess you lose count after a while.”

  With Belphegor rendered momentarily harmless—only momentarily—she turned her attention to the switch in the center of the floor. It was a simple mechanism. Moving the lever from the ten o’clock position to the two o’clock was enough to throw open the gates. They hadn’t bothered making it more difficult to open since there were very few demons that were strong enough to manually operate it, and fewer still that could get past Belphegor’s defenses.

  “It doesn’t matter if you open the guard houses,” he said as she tested the weight of the lever. “The wards are linked by soul and blood to the lord of the House. You cannot invade without his compliance.”

  “Soul links don’t work once the owner is dead,” she said. “And I killed Abraxas weeks ago.”

  For the first time, Belphegor felt fear.

  She kicked the lever.

  Jerica sat outside the gates to the House of Abraxas for what must have been two weeks on Earth. She entertained herself by listening to the occasional chime of bells marking the passing days and watching the slaves taken on their twice-quarterly jogs. There were a surprising number of familiar faces among the humans bought by the House of Abraxas. Someone, she thought, had been emptying Reno of its remaining mortal inhabitants, and turning a nice profit off of it.

  On the first outing of the slaves, she spotted one man that used to frequent the strip club where she used to work—a handsome thing with meth teeth and heavy tattoos. The tattoos were probably the only reason he was still alive. Had his skin been pristine, he would have been well suited to the tanners, youthful and supple as he was.

  Two others on that run were former UNR cheerleaders. Jerica had seen them at a Pack game before the city fell to apocalypse and eventual Union occupation. They must not have escaped during the evacuation. Their athleticism made them ideal for labor. Too ideal, perhaps. One of them seemed to have a broken arm. It wouldn’t be long before she was repurposed.

  Long hours stretched between the first run and the second; Jerica sharpened her butcher’s knives again. Occasionally, she balanced them on her fingertip and used the reflection to see around the corner of the alley. There was nothing to see but empty street and the occasional fleeing demon.

  If she had tried to hide near the gates of a House a few years earlier, she would have been visited promptly by Palace guards, or attacked by the rebellion. Now, the streets of Dis were seldom populated. The times Abraxas’s slaves were taken out to be exercised were the only times more than a handful of demons were on the streets anymore.

  It wasn’t that there were no demons in Dis anymore. Quite the contrary. They still lurked in the alleys, and on auction days, the market district would be as full as it had ever been. But when it emptied out after the last auction, the citizens of the city would vanish silently without ever crossing a main street.<
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  They all feared the fissure.

  Jerica couldn’t see it from her perspective unless she tilted her knife just so. Then she could see a sliver hanging over the building behind her—a construction meant to resemble Johannesburg tenements—and through that sliver she could see sky. Not the murky red sky of Hell, but the pale, brilliant blue of Earth.

  She didn’t dare stare into it for long.

  On the second outing of the slaves, Jerica only recognized one face—a pale-skinned woman with black hair and a bandaged hand. That woman’s appearance meant that everything was, unfortunately, going to plan.

  “Is she in?” Neuma asked when she returned. She was a half-succubus, half-human Gray, but in the livery of Palace security, she looked as intimidating as any hellborn demon. They had raided the supply center in the nightmare district shortly after arriving in Dis and been wearing the leather body armor ever since. It made them horribly conspicuous—the guard hadn’t been seen in years—but they would need every protection they could get in the assault to come.

  “She’s in,” Jerica said, chewing her last piece of bubble gum with renewed fervor. It was flavorless and tacky, but she didn’t want to spit it out until she found more. It was the only thing keeping her nerves settled. “It won’t be long now.”

  Neuma couldn’t manage a smile at that. Instead, she fidgeted with the leash as if it were the most fascinating thing in the world. The other end of the chain connected to the collar of a dog wearing a wire basket muzzle—a dog named Ace, which Neuma insisted was an ordinary pit bull, and not demonic at all. Jerica didn’t believe her. Ace had already bitten her twice, and jaws like that didn’t belong on mortal animals.

  “Won’t be long now,” Neuma echoed.

  What was and was not a “long time” was subjective. Time passed differently in Dis than it did on Earth; what felt like a single day passing in Hell meant that a week had disappeared topside. Jerica had spent the last five years on Earth and had grown accustomed to its timeline. It disturbed her to know that days were slipping past while she sat idly by in the alley outside the House of Abraxas.

  It was almost another full day—a week on Earth—before anything happened. The slaves were taken on another run. Jerica and Neuma waited, rationing out water for Ace and watching for the sign.

  There was no warning when it came.

  The front gates opened with a clank and a groan. Jerica stood, drawing her knives, and watched as the gates on the next guard tower, and the next, also slid open.

  The House of Abraxas was exposed.

  She shared a long look with Neuma—the kind of look that said goodbye, just in case things went worse than they hoped—and then rushed the front gate.

  The primary gates of the House weren’t expecting assault; they were guarded only by a pair of fiends with short swords. Jerica allowed all of her energy to pour out of her in a rush. Her own fear of what was surely a kamikaze mission multiplied exponentially as she projected it. As a nightmare demon, she could evoke fear in those near her as easily as she could feast on it.

  Normally, the wards on the House walls should have protected the guards from an assault by her energy. But she saw the moment that fear came over the fiends. One of them dropped its sword.

  So it was true—Abraxas was dead.

  Chains jangled behind her, and Ace shot past Jerica, unleashed and unmuzzled. His muscles rippled as broad paws pounded against the stone ground. He leaped on the unarmed fiend. Those incredible jaws clamped down on the fiend’s throat and ripped.

  Jerica didn’t watch the dog kill. She lifted her knife to block the swing of the second guard’s sword, then thrust her other blade into its gut while it was exposed.

  The fiend fell, and she rushed toward the inner gates of the House.

  Neuma matched her stride. “Over there!”

  Jerica looked where she pointed. Two more guards were rushing them from the nearest tower.

  They were better prepared than the first had been, weapons drawn and helmets shielding their faces. Other guards were rushing from the other towers, converging on the point of assault.

  “Great,” Jerica said, and she meant it. It terrified her to see those things running at her. Fiends were mindless, gargoyle-like creatures with bulging eyes and a thirst for killing. Individually, they posed little threat; in groups, they were brutal. And they were gathering quite a group.

  But her growing fear meant that her powers were growing, too. It surrounded her in an electric haze. The first fiend that hit it fell over catatonic in an instant.

  Neuma distanced herself, standing aside as Ace rushed headfirst into the crowd of attacking fiends. The scent of blood and sounds of screaming filled the air.

  Jerica slashed and cut, driving her knives between the clumsy plates of the fiends’ armor. She felt a blade penetrate her side, but registered little pain; stabbing wounds were ineffective against nightmares of her strength.

  The second strike didn’t hurt, either, nor did the third. But there were too many fiends. Each one she felled was replaced by two more. The House of Abraxas had emptied its barracks to stop them.

  Jerica moved forward a step at a time as she dropped each fiend, approaching the House inches at a time. She wanted to get her back to the wall. Keep the fiends from surrounding her. The fear she produced made them slow, but fiends were already slow-minded; once they knew to brace themselves against her, it wasn’t enough to cripple them.

  Neuma and Jerica finally broke through to the front steps of the House. “Go!” Neuma cried, throwing her weight against the switch on the left side of the door. Jerica operated the right side.

  With a groan, the door lifted, baring the foyer of pit glass beyond.

  Mission accomplished.

  But their moment of distraction had allowed them to become surrounded, and almost an entire centuria of fiends ringed the steps, closing in on them. Jerica couldn’t see beyond the barrage of leathery skin and short blades. There was no sign of Ace.

  She glimpsed Neuma over the heads of the attacking fiends, and there was panic in her eyes.

  A voice boomed over the din.

  “Stop.”

  That one word cut through all of the fiends, and they instantly froze.

  Jerica jerked her knife free of a fiend and kicked it to the ground. Its blood was hot on her hand and slicked her blade. She turned to attack another—but it wasn’t even looking at her.

  All of the fiends were staring at the door to the House of Abraxas.

  A woman stood in the open doorway framed by the jagged teeth of bone adorning the entrance. She radiated with infernal glory that made her hair stream into the darkness surrounding them. Her flesh glowed with inner light. Even though Jerica had known her for years, had come to Hell at her request, she had never seen Elise Kavanagh quite like this.

  She was the Father: the face carved upon so many idols around the wastelands of Dis, the origin of the species.

  It was like glimpsing God.

  Jerica dropped to her knees reflexively, bowing her head. With her gaze lowered, she realized that there was another demon beside Elise on the stairs: a sallow-fleshed creature wearing a Steward’s raiment, chained like a hog and contained by magic. It was Belphegor, legendary right hand of the Judge, and he was unconscious.

  Which meant that Belphegor was defeated.

  Ace trotted out of the crowd, oblivious to the awe that had seized the demons. His whiplike tail swished back and forth as he mounted the steps to the House. Blood coursed down a gash on his side and cuts on his muzzle. Most of the blood on his face didn’t belong to him. He sat beside Elise, tongue lolling, ears perked.

  “Good boy,” she said with a half-smile, and then she turned to address the fiends.

  Elise lifted the hand that wasn’t holding Belphegor’s chains. Her fist danced with magical flame. Runes slithered down her forearm. It was terrifying and unnatural to see a demon with mortal magic, but the fiends were too stupid to realize how strange it
was; they were cowed enough by the sight of the Father holding Belphegor hostage.

  “You’re all mine,” she said. It was so quiet that she didn’t need to raise her voice to be heard across the grounds. “Drop your weapons.”

  The fiends, of course, obeyed.

  With three demons and a dog, the House had been taken.

  Two

  The worst part of the slave quarters was the pristine cleanliness of them. Belphegor and Abraxas had been attentive to the needs of the mortal inhabitants of the kennels, which meant that they had been directly involved in their care. They hadn’t set the humans aside and ignored them. They had reveled in the suffering.

  Elise had been in Dis for almost a month on Earth, which felt like three days in Hell. Three days was more than enough for her to have seen the worst that the city had to offer, particularly since she had deliberately sought out the worst; she had joined the slaves sold to the House of Abraxas at the auction in the market district, walked past the butchers and the tanners, and spent a day caged as she waited for an opportunity to take Belphegor.

  Now she was out, and things were going to change.

  “Open the cages,” she told the fiend guarding the first floor of cages. The word “guarding” only applied very loosely; it was unarmed and unarmored, wearing nothing but scraps of a loincloth.

  It didn’t move at her order.

  Elise nudged it with her toe. “Hey. Open the cages.”

  Even though she had barely touched it, the fiend drew away from her and bowed its forehead to the floor. All of the fiends did that. Even though she had pulled herself together to appear human again, they wouldn’t look at her long enough to see that she wasn’t glowing with demonic glory anymore. They also weren’t responding to commands.

  She suppressed the urge to kick the fiend.

  “I’ll help free everyone,” Jerica said, sauntering into the kennels behind Elise. The nightmare was wearing body armor they had stolen from the Palace supply sheds, just like Neuma, but it was in much worse condition than when Elise had last seen it. Wide gashes on the stomach and shins bared sallow, unmarked flesh underneath. Nightmares were more sponge than meat—virtually impossible to injure.